Though London’s Times Literary Supplement has placed Christina Stead in the company of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Ibsen, and Joyce, she still remains unknown to most readers in the United States, despite her deliciously twisted sense of humor, her pointed social satire, and her vividly depicted characters. In this novel, set in a small hotel on Lake Geneva in the immediate aftermath of World War II, Stead introduces an assortment of bizarre guests currently living at the small Hotel Swiss-Touring. Though most of them are accustomed to more elegant accommodations, the twenty-six-year-old hotelkeeper, Selda Bonnard, and her slightly older husband Roger do their best to meet their guests’ needs.
In this first person narrative, told by Selda Bonnard, the various guests at the hotel come alive for the reader. One, who claims to be the Mayor of B in Belgium, appears to be certifiable, creating numbered documents about his stay in the hotel and traveling to “the clinic” daily for “injections” and shock treatments. Mrs. Blaise, whose husband comes to visit every other weekend from Basel, claims to have millions of dollars and packets of jewels safely stowed in New York banks. Mrs. Trollope, a dark woman from “the East,” lives with her “cousin,” Robert Wilkins, who is constantly following the exchange rates and suggesting that his “cousin” move her accounts out of England closer to him. A strange English woman named Miss Abbey-Chillard, who appears to have almost no money, also appears to have serious health issues and demands special foods.
These five permanent guests form the core of the novel, and as they reveal themselves through their conversations and interactions, they begin to resemble characters in a dramatic comedy of manners. The hotel employees resent them and their frequently high-handed demands, and an undercurrent of cruelty by the employees toward the guests emerges. The Mayor of B provides unintentional comic relief throughout, and when he begins to imitate the strip tease dancer who lives upstairs, his deep-seated problems become public. Gradually, through the characters’ conversations, the reader learns the nature of the relationships among all the other characters, with most of the action eventually focused on the relationship of Mrs. Trollope and her “cousin,” Robert Wilkins.
All of Stead’s characters are flawed, and since all are shown in intimate scenes in which they reveal themselves, at least to the reader, they inspire a kind of empathy – and even a pervading sadness – which does not often happen within social satire, which is usually characterized by sterotypes. Even Mme. Bonnard, the hotel keeper, has her problems, and though she is the main unifying character, her inflexibility regarding aspects of the hotel management make her less than sympathetic, at some points. The novel as a whole is elegant and consummately literary, building an intense, darkly humorous, and sometimes claustrophobic atmosphere as the characters try to live their straitened lives and survive to live another day in a changed world. Christina Stead, a superb novelist who can easily hold her own with contemporaries Beryl Bainbridge, Fay Weldon, Penelope Lively, and Muriel Spark in England, and Thea Astley and Elizabeth Jolley in Australia, deserves much more recognition in the US.
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